The present disclosure generally relates to appliances, and more particularly to a surface burner lockout system for a cooking appliance.
Cooking appliances with cooking surfaces that include electric or gas surface heating elements or burners will typically include a lockout feature. The lockout feature provides the ability to lock out or disable the operation of the surface heating elements on the cooktop surface. When a lockout device is deactivated, a check is made prior to reactivation to ensure that none of the appliance or burner controls are in the activated position. If a burner control were to be in an activated position when the lockout device is deactivated, there is the chance that the surface heating element could come on unexpectedly. It is also not desirable to activate the lockout device while the surface heating elements are in use.
A typical implementation will utilize an electronic range control (ERC) device. The electronic range control device will generally monitor and determine a state of the surface heating elements before operation (activation or deactivation) of the lockout device is allowed. This requires additional components, circuitry and connections to sense the state of each surface heating element. It would be advantageous to be able to sense the state of the lockout device in order to determine the state of the surface heating element.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a system that addresses at least some of the problems identified above.